Email Grabber 2 (found at emailgrabber.net) is a relatively simple and minimal email-finding software, available for only $16.95 (significantly cheaper than all other email-finders I’ve tested). Here I’ll test and review it to see if it’s worth picking over more expensive tools.
Installing Email Grabber
Go to emailgrabber.net and click the DOWNLOAD A FREE TRIAL button. Email Grabber has a standard install process:
Using Email Grabber
After installing Email Grabber, it’ll look like this when you open it for the first time:
To get started, click the “Queue Manager” button in the top-left. Unlike other email-finding tools, there are only two options when it comes to Email Grabber: finding emails from a website or list of websites, or finding emails by giving a search engine some keywords and crawling the websites it brings back.
For finding emails with search engines, only Google and Yahoo! are available, and I didn’t get any results during my own testing of it (using the keyword “yoga”):
But as with my other tests with different email-finding tools, I was only really interested in using Email Grabber to find emails from a list of specific websites. Here’s how you’d use it for that — you can put a list of URL’s or websites in a .txt file (1 URL per line), and import it into Email Grabber:
You have a limited number of preferences to tweak before running a search (go to File -> Preferences):
And as with other software, you can tell it how deep it should crawl a site:
After you’ve tweaked your preferences and gone into the Queue Manager to add a list of URL’s or websites to search for emails (or added a keyword to use with a search engine that will bring back a list of websites to search), click the START button and Email Grabber will get to work finding emails:
Here’s how it looks when you’re running a search (again, very simple):
The limitations of Email Grabber
Email Grabber is the least-functional and least-useful email-finding tool of all the ones I’ve tested so far (see my Atomic Email Hunter review, Email Extractor Pro review and Cute Web Email Extractor review). Here are just a few of its limitations:
Misses a lot of emails
This is something I’ve complained about in my reviews of other email-finding tools, but in my testing Email Grabber couldn’t find any emails that were obscured or hidden in any way. For example, if failed to find both of these emails (you would expect a smart email-finding software to identify these as [email protected]):
So if a webmaster has tried to hide their email from email scrapers in any way, Email Grabber probably won’t be able to find it. There’s an option for “basic Javascript processing” in Email Grabber (in File -> Preferences), but even with this enabled it couldn’t find emails obfuscated by Cloudflare (like other email-finding tools, unfortunately).
No option to return only 1 email per domain
If you’re looking to return just 1 email for each website, it can’t be done with Email Grabber, making it bad for doing targeted outreach to website owners (this was also an issue with Email Extractor Pro). In fact, as far as I can see, there’s no option anywhere to set a limit on how many emails should be found for a given website (only an option to limit how many pages of a website it looks at).
No option to return only @theactualdomain.com emails
If you’re searching outwittrade.com for emails, you may only want to get emails from people belonging to the site, so emails with ‘@outwittrade.com’ in them. There’s no option for this in Email Grabber.
Can’t use a proxy when searching for emails
This should be a basic feature for any desktop-based email-finder, but unfortunately, Email Grabber doesn’t allow you to use proxies at all. All other desktop-based email-finders I’ve tested so far let you use a proxy.
Can’t prioritize pages to look at when searching a website
Also an issue with other tools I’ve tested. If you’re trying to find emails on a website, the first page a good tool should look at is a page with ‘contact’ in the URL, but it doesn’t look like Email Grabber does this.
The bottom line on Email Grabber
Email Grabber is not a bad product, and may be worth it if you’re on a tight budget and don’t want to spend more than $20 or so on an email-finding software. But if you have more to spend and plan on doing a lot of email outreach, I recommend spending a little more to get something with more features and better email-finding capabilities. Atomic Email Hunter remains my favorite desktop-based email-finding software so far.